Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Articles
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
1) What Is Minnesota’s Policy on Cooperating With Federal Immigration Enforcement?
The Trump administration has criticized state and local “sanctuary” policies during its Minnesota immigration crackdown. The reality on the ground is complicated. What Is Minnesota’s Policy on Cooperating With Federal Immigration Enforcement?
The Trump administration has criticized state and local “sanctuary” policies during its Minnesota immigration crackdown. The reality on the ground is complicated.
By Mitch Smith and Ernesto Londoño, Feb. 6, 2026
Federal agents clashed with Minnesotans while attempting to stop a resident as part of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis last month. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Months before immigration agents flooded into Minnesota, the Trump administration outlined its grievances against state and local officials in a lawsuit that accused them of engaging in “an active and deliberate effort to obstruct federal immigration enforcement.”
The claims in that lawsuit, which remains unresolved, have been echoed by President Trump and his allies in recent weeks as some 3,000 agents descended on the state, where they have arrested thousands, clashed with residents and shot three people.
The Trump administration is correct that certain state and local policies limit cooperation on immigration enforcement, yet the details of those policies are complex and vary depending on location. The Democrats who lead Minnesota have defended their limits on cooperating with federal agents as lawful and in line with the state’s values.
The reality is that Minnesota’s state and local governments have a patchwork of rules that go much further to limit coordination on immigration than in many Republican-led states, but stop short of the comprehensive statewide restrictions on cooperation in other Democratic-run states like California, Illinois and Oregon.
As political and legal fights continue, here’s what you should know about Minnesota’s immigration policies:
State prisons coordinate with ICE
Minnesota prisons routinely hand over inmates who are in the country illegally to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when they complete their sentences.
Under Minnesota law, the state’s Department of Corrections must notify ICE officials when an immigrant convicted of a felony is set to be released. Last year, prison officials turned over to ICE 84 inmates who had finished sentences and were leaving the prison system, according to the state agency.
Prison officials said they had been exasperated — and confused — by the Trump administration’s claims that they have not cooperated.
County jails are a source of federal frustration
Federal officials have repeatedly complained that Minnesota jails release people who don’t have authorization to be in the United States with little or no effort to transfer them to federal custody. But some in the state have raised concerns about whether it is appropriate for jails to hand over people whose criminal cases are still pending.
While Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, explicitly bans coordinating with ICE on civil immigration enforcement, there is no such ban for the rest of the state’s county jails.
Still, official opinions issued by Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, have said that sheriffs cannot hold people wanted by ICE longer than they would otherwise be jailed. That can prove to be a logistical challenge for federal officials, who have said that Mr. Ellison's opinion had contributed to little or no cooperation at several jails.
Sheriffs in at least seven of Minnesota’s 87 counties have signed agreements to collaborate with ICE on immigration enforcement, a step that Mr. Ellison, a Democrat, has said is allowed as long as the county’s board of commissioners has signed off. A few jails in the state have contracts to provide beds for immigrants in ICE custody. But in many counties, there is no explicit policy on coordinating with ICE.
There might be room for negotiation
James Stuart, the executive director of the Minnesota Sheriffs’ Association, said sheriffs were working to address concerns raised by federal officials in hopes of seeing fewer immigration agents operating on Minnesota streets in the days ahead. He described recent meetings with Tom Homan, the White House border czar who is leading the Minnesota crackdown, as productive. Mr. Stuart is also President Trump’s nominee for U.S. marshal in Minnesota.
Conversations remain a work in progress, Mr. Stuart said, and any agreements to hold detainees for federal officials would require the approval of a county’s elected board.
Mr. Stuart said that the agreements under consideration, known as Basic Ordering Agreements, would apply to people arrested on local charges, wanted for immigration violations and slated to be released. Those people could remain in jail for up to 48 hours beyond their expected release times, Mr. Stuart said, but during that time would become federal detainees in the custody of the local sheriff rather than local detainees.
Not everyone is on board. The Hennepin County attorney, Mary Moriarty, said in a statement that she believed such agreements would violate state law. And Sheriff Dawanna Witt of Hennepin County, who runs the state’s largest jail, said on Wednesday that local jail officials should not be in the business of civil immigration enforcement.
A spokesman for Mr. Ellison’s office declined to comment specifically on Basic Ordering Agreements, saying the office “can’t provide legal punditry or speculation.”
Minnesota officials were also discussing ways to improve communication with federal officials, Mr. Stuart said.
The Twin Cities have sweeping protections for immigrants
The federal government’s complaints about Minnesota go beyond prisons and jails. Its lawsuit singles out city ordinances in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the state’s two largest cities, that bar local police officers from cooperating with civil immigration enforcement and that mostly prevent city workers from inquiring about a person’s immigration status.
Supporters of such policies say that they do not interfere with immigration enforcement, but leave that work to federal officials. Those limits, they argue, help to build trust with residents who might otherwise not feel comfortable coming forward with information about a crime.
“This clear delineation keeping police and city officials separate from civil immigration enforcement removes the chill from talking to the police,” lawyers for St. Paul said in a court filing that asked a judge to dismiss the federal government’s lawsuit.
The state government has a more piecemeal approach
On the state level, Minnesota has passed some laws granting protections for undocumented immigrants, but has stopped short of broader policies that some Democrats would prefer.
In 2023, Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, signed into law a measure allowing undocumented immigrants to get Minnesota driver’s licenses, and state law prevents officials from sharing information about a driver’s immigration status.
But Democrats have not succeeded in passing sweeping, statewide sanctuary protections similar to the local policies in Minneapolis and St. Paul and in some other states.
In 2024, Sandra Feist, a Democratic state lawmaker, introduced a bill that sought to bar local law enforcement officials from playing a role in the enforcement of immigration laws. The bill failed. A Republican-backed measure seeking to bar sheriffs from adopting policies that restrict cooperation with ICE also has not passed.
“We’re definitely not a runaway train on immigrant rights here in Minnesota,” said Ms. Feist, who is also an immigration lawyer. “Minnesota does not have political makeup to pass that type of legislation at this time.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
2) Trump’s Immigration Policy Is 100 Years Old
The White House seems to be mining the Coolidge era for inspiration. But America is not the country it was in 1924.
By Jia Lynn Yang, Feb. 6, 2026
Jia Lynn Yang is the author of the book “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965.”
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
The American public is now finding out what Donald Trump and his team really meant when they promised mass deportations — the upending of communities in a ferocious effort to ferret out every last undocumented person in the country, terrifying people of legal status along the way.
This audacious agenda is proving less popular by the day. When asked about Trump’s handling of immigration in a recent poll by The New York Times/Siena, he received a net negative approval rating on what used to be one of his strongest issues. Sixty-one percent said they thought the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had “gone too far” with its tactics. This was before federal agents shot and killed a second U.S. citizen in the streets of Minneapolis.
Chastened briefly, Trump promised to “de-escalate” in Minnesota. On Wednesday, his border czar, recently dispatched to take control of the operation in Minneapolis, announced that 700 agents would be pulled from the city, though some 2,000 will remain. But however ICE changes its operations, the Trump administration, led by the president’s most influential policy adviser, Stephen Miller, is in pursuit of a radical vision for America. They want the country’s immigration policy blasted back in time — and not just to before the Biden era.
They are channeling an immigration regime instituted in 1924, when strict racial quotas — driven by fears of foreigners and a rise in eugenic thinking — led to a bottoming-out of foreign-born Americans that lasted for decades. The quotas signed into law in 1924 were not about securing the border as we understand it today, but about protecting a white, Christian character for the country.
In the years after the 1924 immigration law was passed, however, a liberal backlash took hold and created a new identity for the United States, internalized by generations of Americans since: We are a nation of immigrants.
Americans are, in fact, widely partial to immigrants — and these days even open to admitting more. Last year, as border crossings sharply fell, the share of people who wanted immigration reduced dropped to 30 percent from 55 percent in 2024, according to Gallup. A record-high 79 percent say immigration is a good thing for the country, including even Republicans, who have become more likely to take this view since Trump took office.
Today many act as if America’s identity as a nation of immigrants was written into the Constitution itself. In reality, it was the product of a political effort less than a century ago — one that was so successful at creating a new national story that it birthed the sheer ethnic diversity in this country that the Trump administration is now determined to undo.
‘Immigrants Were American History’
As recently as 50 years ago, the country’s population was almost entirely descended from people who came from Western Europe. This was by design.
At the turn of the 20th century, enormous numbers of Southern and Eastern Europeans, many of them Italian and Jewish, were arriving daily in the United States and transforming the cultural fabric of cities like New York and Boston. At a time when antisemitism was ubiquitous in American life, the sheer volume of these migrants constituted a national emergency for white Protestant Christians. Eugenicists, at the peak of their influence, warned that the foreigners were polluting the nation’s “blood plasma.”
In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed a law imposing strict ethnic quotas, allowing only a trickle of migration from Southern and Eastern Europe and banning it nearly outright from Asia and Africa. Strong preference would be given to immigrants from Western Europe, who could, it was believed, help the country restore its racial roots.
“We no longer are to be a haven, a refuge for oppressed the whole world over,” wrote Representative David A. Reed, who cosponsored the 1924 law in Congress. “We found we could not be, and now we definitely abandon that theory. America will cease to be the ‘melting pot.’” In Germany, Adolf Hitler, still on the political margins, praised America’s new immigration law as offering a bold model for his own country.
The quotas were immediately effective, and merciless. During World War II, the country’s immigration rules were so stringent that Jews fleeing the Holocaust had practically no chance of entering the United States. For more than 40 years after 1924, the number of immigrants in this country dwindled to the point where Americans could barely remember a time when there was mass migration.
But just as the country was approaching its nadir in immigration, a group of liberal leaders began a long-shot campaign to undo the discriminatory 1920s quotas. And they employed a conception of national identity that turned the anti-immigration argument on its head.
Immigrants did not make the country less American, these advocates argued. In fact, their very presence was what made this country American in the first place.
The person most responsible for this narrative was historian Oscar Handlin, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. In works of history that became remarkably popular, Handlin chronicled the waves of German and Irish immigrants, then Italian and Jewish ones. “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history,” Handlin wrote in the opening lines of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1951 book, “The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People.”
This new conception immediately captivated much of the country. It gave the children and grandchildren of the immigrants once derided as outsiders a pride of place. More important, it proved to be just the message that would convince the country that it needed a new system of immigration.
While Handlin himself became involved in the effort to rewrite the laws, Democratic leaders began to adopt his framework. John F. Kennedy, then a senator from Massachusetts, was asked by the Anti-Defamation League to write a slim book lauding the country’s many waves of migration. The proposed title: “A Nation of Immigrants.”
This modest project would not be published until October 1964, nearly a year after Kennedy was assassinated. But in a country still in mourning, the first printing sold out. “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies,” read the introduction written by the Kennedy family, perhaps overstating the president’s interest in the issue. Nonetheless, the book positioned itself as a powerful, posthumous plea for overturning the ethnic quotas, spoken from the grave by the country’s first Catholic president and an Irish American icon.
A year later, after a four-decade fight, immigration advocates prevailed. Led in part by Ted Kennedy in the Senate, Democratic lawmakers voted to undo the quotas with the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The law, signed by Lyndon Johnson at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, codified that immigrants could not be discriminated against based on their race or nationality. Family members would also be prioritized.
The 1924 quotas had altered the course of the country’s demographics by effectively freezing them in place. The 1965 law unleashed a level of ethnic diversity that not even its proponents could have fathomed. Immigrants soon began arriving from every conceivable corner of the globe, and in growing numbers thanks to the priority given to reuniting families.
After the number of foreign-born residents hit a bottom around 1970, it climbed and climbed until it rebounded to nearly 15 percent, where it had been before the quotas.
Last January, the month Trump was inaugurated, it reached a record 15.8 percent.
Who Is Considered an American?
Without passing a single law through Congress, the Trump administration has revived the 1924 quotas in spirit by halting visas for people from 75 countries, a vast majority of them outside Europe. No credible evidence has been offered for why immigrants from these nations are inherently less worthy of admission than Afrikaners from South Africa, for instance, who have been given expedited refugee status. But on top of Trump’s insults against Haitian, Somali and Mexican immigrants and the Muslim travel ban from his first term, the collective implications of racial selection are clear.
Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, appreciates the history of American immigration policy. We know this because of emails that have been unearthed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in which he admires the 1924 quotas and Coolidge’s anti-immigration legacy.
In one 2015 email, Miller wrote that Immigrant Heritage Month “would seem a good opportunity to remind people about the heritage established by Calvin Coolidge, which covers four decades of the 20th century,” a reference to the restrictive period between 1924 and 1965. He also complained that new museum galleries at Ellis Island would ignore the legacy of the 1924 law. “Something tells me there is not a Calvin Coolidge exhibit.”
In Miller’s eyes, the 1965 law deserves to be known as a key moment for when the country fell from greatness. In other emails, he coached a Breitbart writer to produce a piece called “Ted Kennedy’s Real Legacy: 50 Years of Ruinous Immigration Law,” timed to run on the day that a new center honoring Kennedy was to open in Boston. Miller wrote to the writer after the piece’s publication, “Just let this sink in: Kennedy was honored today, 50 years after pushing through this law, and you’re the only writer in the country who published a piece even mentioning the law and what it did.”
For conservatives like Miller, the idea of “a nation of immigrants” has lured the country into admitting far too many people, without enough vetting. Indeed, during Trump’s first term, the agency responsible for processing citizenship and naturalization removed the phrase from its mission statement.
Trump and Miller learned the last time around, though, how hard it can be to bring down the overall percentage of immigrants in the country, which only grew between 2017 and 2021. This time, their efforts are beginning to yield results: Immigration has dropped by more than 50 percent, and the percentage of foreign-born residents has fallen for the first time since the 1960s. Theirs is a long-term project, with success measured in decades.
“A nation of immigrants” is an old slogan, but its spirit has proved difficult to dislodge. America today is in many ways a nation remade by the 1965 Immigration Act, with millions of citizens descended from those who came to the country after Coolidge’s quotas were revoked.
Support for carrying out some deportations has been a mainstream political view for decades. But most American voters want to see the highly focused removal of unauthorized immigrants who are violent criminals, according to recent polling. There is far less support for deporting those who are married to U.S. citizens, or who haven’t committed any crimes.
For all the anti-immigrant vitriol from Trump these many years, people in both urban and rural America are by now largely used to living peacefully with immigrants as their neighbors, co-workers and family members. And a large majority, not only in Minneapolis, simply do not want to see their neighbors brutally removed from their homes by men in masks without warrants.
From the start of Trump’s first term, the president’s immigration agenda was always about more than the border. It was a project to rewrite who can be considered American. Because this was not the mandate that most voters gave in 2024, the administration could pay a political price in the midterms in the fall. In the meantime, it can wake up every day and treat the time remaining as a chance to press ahead, by any means and at any cost.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
3) Judge Allows Release of Evidence From Border Patrol Shooting
A Border Patrol agent shot Marimar Martinez five times. Video from the October incident in Chicago could now be released as early as Monday.
By Mattathias Schwartz and Robert Chiarito, Feb. 6, 2026
Mattathias Schwartz reported from Philadelphia, and Robert Chiarito from the Dirksen Federal Building in Chicago.
Prosecutors charged Marimar Martinez with assaulting federal officers, but later dropped the case. Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
A federal judge in Chicago will allow the release of evidence, including body camera video footage and text messages, from the October shooting of Marimar Martinez, a 30-year-old teacher’s assistant, by a Border Patrol agent in Chicago.
On Friday, Judge Georgia N. Alexakis of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois said she would allow the release of text messages from Charles Exum, the agent who shot Ms. Martinez, and video of the incident, as soon as the materials were redacted to obscure the identities of other parties. That could happen as soon as Monday, Ms. Martinez’s attorney said.
The evidence was gathered as part of the now-defunct criminal case against Ms. Martinez and had been sealed by a judicial protective order.
In its filings, the government has argued that releasing the text messages “will serve only to further sully Agent Exum, his family and co-workers.”
Ms. Martinez’s attorney, Christopher V. Parente, responded that it would be “a fully deserved self-imposed sullying,” following a “campaign of lies” against Ms. Martinez by the Department of Homeland Security. After the hearing on Friday, he praised the judge’s ruling. “You can’t call a U.S. citizen with no criminal history who’s a Montessori schoolteacher a domestic terrorist,” he said.
Ruling from the bench, Judge Alexakis said Ms. Martinez had “demonstrated good cause to warrant the release of the text messages,” because they “will counter the government’s public narrative of her and her actions.”
Friday’s court proceeding is the latest chapter in a saga that began on Oct. 4, when Ms. Martinez was driving one of two vehicles that were honking as they trailed an S.U.V. carrying federal agents and shouting, “La migra,” the Spanish term for immigration authorities. The Trump administration would later characterize these actions as “domestic terrorism.” Ms. Martinez’s attorney has compared her to Paul Revere, warning neighbors about the presence of Homeland Security officers.
Ms. Martinez’s vehicle collided with the S.U.V. on the Southwest Side of Chicago. Moments later, Mr. Exum, a Border Patrol agent, shot her five times while she was still in her car. Text messages from Mr. Exum appear to show him bragging about the shooting. “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes,” he wrote. “Put that in your book boys.”
Once released, the evidence could shed light on competing claims about the moments leading up to the shooting. A Customs and Border Protection incident report claims that Mr. Exum fired “to defend himself and his fellow agents” after Ms. Martinez “accelerated forward in an attempt to run over agents on foot.” In court filings, Mr. Parente claimed Mr. Exum opened fire “within two seconds” of exiting his vehicle.
Prosecutors charged Ms. Martinez with assaulting federal officers, but after Ms. Martinez’s legal team raised concerns about the preservation of evidence — the S.U.V. had been moved hundreds of miles away — they dropped the case.
The Homeland Security Department’s initial claims about the collision and the shooting are among many assertions by administration officials about protesters’ behavior that have been unable to withstand judicial scrutiny. A Chicago jury acquitted a man who had been accused of putting a bounty on the head of Gregory Bovino, a senior Border Patrol commander who led sweeping raids in Chicago and then Minneapolis. In another case, Judge Sara L. Ellis found that Mr. Bovino had repeatedly lied about the tactics his forces had used against protesters.
Earlier this week, Ms. Martinez testified before Democrats in Congress. “I grew up revering law enforcement,” she said. Seeing what Immigration and Customs Enforcement “was doing in our community at this time changed my view.”
Ms. Martinez, a U.S. citizen, is one of 10 people who have been shot by federal agents since the Trump administration began ramping up its arrest and deportation efforts in September. Her shooting came weeks before the Trump administration shifted its immigration enforcement effort from Chicago to Minneapolis, where two protesters have been killed by federal agents.
The case of one of those protesters, Renee Good, has echoes of Ms. Martinez’s. Government officials accused Ms. Good, who was driving, of weaponizing her vehicle against the Border Patrol agent who shot her. Mr. Trump’s claim that “she ran him over” has been disputed by state and local officials, and challenged by a New York Times analysis of cellphone video. As with Ms. Martinez, the administration quickly branded Ms. Good as a “domestic terrorist” before a thorough investigation, and despite an apparent gap with the legal definition of that term.
Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, has said that both Ms. Good and Alex Pretti, the other protester shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, were engaged in “domestic terrorism.” “We were using the best information we had at the time,” she later said on Fox News regarding Mr. Pretti. The Department of Homeland Security did not directly respond when asked if Ms. Noem stood by her initial characterization. Instead, a spokesman responded with a statement criticizing “attempts to dox our law enforcement officers” and “the malicious rhetoric of sanctuary politicians.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
4) Trump’s Indecent Nuclear Proposal
By W.J. Hennigan, Feb. 6, 2026
Mr. Hennigan writes about national security, foreign policy and conflict for Times Opinion.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Every American president for the past half-century had come into the White House and presented a vision to the world on how he intends to reduce the risk of thermonuclear war.
Successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican, went about it in the same basic way: signing deals with Russia (and, before that, the Soviet Union) to open lines of communication and slash the number of nuclear weapons in their respective arsenals.
Each new nuclear deal built upon the last one, weaving a safety net of treaties and agreements to ensure nuclear stability and predictability between adversaries so the unthinkable never occurred. The approach was far from perfect, but it worked: The number of warheads fell from roughly 70,400 in 1986 to 12,500 today.
President Trump ripped up that well-established strategy this week when he failed to extend the last major nuclear deal with Russia. That treaty, known as New START, went into effect in 2011 and limited each side to 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads deployed on bomber planes, submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Once it expired on Thursday, he posted on social media that the world needed a “new, improved and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future.”
On Friday, his administration provided more details on what that might mean. Thomas DiNanno, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, said the United States would instead try to initiate talks with the world’s largest nuclear weapons states on a broader multilateral deal.
“The next era of arms control can and should continue with clear focus, but it will require the participation of more than just Russia at the negotiating table,” he said at a U.N. conference on disarmament in Geneva. “We cannot promise that this process will be quick or easy.”
That’s an understatement. The plan is aspirational at best and, at worst, disingenuous.
The Trump team’s proposal for an all-encompassing nuclear deal has a surface appeal. Why should it just be the United States and Russia who are treaty bound to limit their nuclear weapons? Shouldn’t we try to restrict all the world’s arsenals and ensure all states with nuclear arms are accountable to one another?
It’s admirable for the administration to attempt to wrangle other nuclear-armed states into agreements that could limit the size of their arsenals and the types of weapons they develop. But it’s an enormous challenge. The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States — are all recognized nuclear weapons states, but they rarely agree on anything and their arsenals vary widely. The four other nations that have nuclear weapons, but aren’t officially recognized as nuclear states — India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — are unlikely to get invites.
Mr. DiNanno did not list the countries the administration plans to involve, but it hasn’t been shy about its intention to bring China and its fast-expanding arsenal to the table. But China, like other nuclear powers, has expressed little interest in limiting its arsenal. Lin Jian, China’s foreign ministry spokesman, said Thursday at a news conference that Beijing “will not participate in nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage.”
Beijing’s clear reluctance to get involved is one reason this grand strategy approach looks like a bad-faith effort aimed at hobbling strategic arms control altogether. The president has repeatedly said he wants fewer nukes in the world, but he’s abandoned multiple nuclear deals, fired diplomats who handle the nonproliferation portfolio and routinely reminded the world of the sizable arsenal he commands.
Even if there is a diplomatic breakthrough, there’s little chance of reaching a functional new treaty soon. It took negotiators a year to hammer out New START, which itself was a product of decades of diplomatic work. Haggling with one country is hard enough. Adding even one more to the mix would render the task exponentially more complicated and time-consuming.
Alexandra Bell, who was the deputy assistant secretary of state for nuclear affairs in the Biden administration, said that while getting China engaged in arms control talks was a worthy goal, Mr. Trump’s all-or-nothing approach was counterproductive. “The idea that we should forsake a half-century worth of effort to create stability between the U.S. and Russian arsenals for a nebulous attempt at a trilateral agreement is foolish bordering on reckless,” she said.
The United States possesses some 3,700 estimated weapons and Russia has 4,300, compared with China’s estimated 600. Beijing appears to want to wait until it can negotiate from a position of parity, and it is working on reaching that goal. The Pentagon believes China is on track to almost double the number of its warheads to more than 1,000 by the decade’s end, a pace unmatched by any other country today. Beijing might not think it has enough weapons for treaty negotiations, but its growing capabilities have already upended the two-country balance that has dominated the atomic age.
During his speech in Geneva, Mr. DiNanno accused China of conducting a secret nuclear test in 2020, which would be a breach of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the international agreement that prohibits all nuclear explosions. (China is a signatory but has not ratified the treaty.) Mr. DiNanno did not provide evidence of his claim, nor did he explain why this alleged violation took almost six years to come to light, but it could be an attempt to coerce Beijing into talks.
“The U.S. laid out its grievances about Russia and China, and that’s a legitimate part of the process,” said Thomas M. Countryman, who was acting secretary of state for arms control and international security in the Obama administration. “The question now is whether the U.S. will make, privately, concrete proposals for negotiation with Russia and a dialogue with China, as the vast majority of Americans favor. Or will it go directly to uploading warheads as some influential people around Trump are pushing?”
The backdrop to all of this talk of arms control is that there’s now political momentum to add nukes to the American arsenal. Part of this fresh interest is a reaction: The United States, along with China and Russia, is developing a range of space-based and hypersonic technologies that couldn’t have been foreseen more than 15 years ago when New START was drawn up. In that sense, Mr. Trump is correct in wanting to “modernize” arms control. But instead of building on something, we now have nothing. A costly, risky and destabilizing arms race may soon emerge in that vacuum.
The reason the United States focused its arms control efforts on Russia for all these years is that the two countries possess nearly 90 percent of all nuclear warheads. Capping the number of weapons was not only mutually beneficial, but good for the globe.
In the blink of an eye, the United States went from having five decades of virtually uninterrupted arms control talks and deals with Russia to having none — with no new deal in sight. The president and his national security team made no meaningful statement about New START or any outward attempt toward salvaging the deal. Mr. Trump even ignored President Vladimir Putin of Russia’s public offer in September to mutually observe the treaty’s limits for one year after the its lapse.
Now the American president faces a new risk: What happens if his new offer goes nowhere? The proposal is just the latest illustration of Mr. Trump’s willingness to break norms in pursuit of what he hopes will be a better deal. But the world watched him fail to achieve nuclear agreements with North Korea and Iran in his first term. His latest proposal is equally audacious — and potentially more dangerous.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
5) Prosecutors Began Investigating Renee Good’s Killing. Washington Told Them to Stop.
Federal prosecutors had a warrant to collect evidence from Ms. Good’s vehicle, but Trump administration leaders said to drop it. About a dozen prosecutors have departed, leaving the Minnesota U.S. attorney’s office in turmoil.
By Ernesto Londoño, Reporting from Minneapolis, Feb. 7, 2026
“At one point, Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol leader who was the face of the administration’s immigration crackdown in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, called federal prosecutors, pressing them to charge demonstrators with crimes. When a prosecutor asked what the operation’s end goal was, several people familiar with the call recalled Mr. Bovino saying that he did not intend to ‘calm it down,’ but instead, he said, ‘We’re going to put it down.’”
Hours after an immigration agent fatally shot Renee Good inside her S.U.V. on a Minneapolis street last month, a senior federal prosecutor in Minnesota sought a warrant to search the vehicle for evidence in what he expected would be a standard civil rights investigation into the agent’s use of force.
The prosecutor, Joseph H. Thompson, wrote in an email to colleagues that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that specializes in investigating police shootings, would team up with the F.B.I. to determine whether the shooting had been justified and lawful or had violated Ms. Good’s civil rights.
But later that week, as F.B.I. agents equipped with a signed warrant prepared to document blood spatter and bullet holes in Ms. Good’s S.U.V., they received orders to stop, according to several people with knowledge of the events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The orders, they said, came from senior officials, including Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, several of whom worried that pursuing a civil rights investigation — by using a warrant obtained on that basis — would contradict President Trump’s claim that Ms. Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer” who fired at her as she drove her vehicle.
Over the next few days, top Department of Justice officials presented alternative approaches. First, they suggested prosecutors ask a judge to sign a new search warrant for the vehicle, predicated on a criminal investigation into whether the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot Ms. Good, Jonathan Ross, had been assaulted by her. Later, they urged the prosecutors to instead investigate Ms. Good’s partner, who had been with Ms. Good on the morning of the shooting, confronting immigration agents in their Minneapolis neighborhood.
Several of the career federal prosecutors in Minnesota, including Mr. Thompson, balked at the new approach, which they viewed as legally dubious and incendiary in a state where anger over a federal immigration crackdown was already boiling over. Mr. Thompson and five others left the office in protest, setting off a broader wave of resignations that has left Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office severely understaffed and in crisis. Officials have not said whether they ultimately obtained a new warrant to search the vehicle.
From an office of about 25 criminal litigators, gone are the top prosecutors who had overseen a sprawling, yearslong investigation into fraud in Minnesota’s social services programs, which the White House months ago cited as a reason for the immigration crackdown in the state.
The departures also have drained the U.S. attorney’s office as it prepares complex cases, including trials in the fatal attack on a Minnesota state lawmaker and in a terrorism case, and investigations into fentanyl trafficking.
The prosecutors who remain have been flooded with new cases related to the immigration crackdown — allegations of assaults on federal officers and lawsuits challenging the legality of individual detentions of immigrants.
“This is potentially destroying all of the progress that we have made, working together between local and federal law enforcement officials in a very coordinated way, to actually go after the worst of the worst,” Brian O’Hara, the Minneapolis police chief, said in an interview.
What you should know. The Times makes a careful decision any time it uses an anonymous source. The information the source supplies must be newsworthy and give readers genuine insight.
This account of tumult at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota is based on interviews with about a dozen people in Minnesota and Washington, D.C., familiar with the events. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying they feared retaliation from the administration. Some read from notes they took during key moments.
Cindy Burnham, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Minnesota, declined to comment for this article, as did Daniel N. Rosen, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota. Emily Covington, a Justice Department spokeswoman, did not respond to a request for comment.
A Fraud Scandal
The crisis at the U.S. attorney’s office followed a turbulent year.
The Minnesota office was led temporarily by assistant U.S. attorneys for months as Mr. Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney, Mr. Rosen, awaited confirmation.
Some career prosecutors in the office, which has a long reputation for winning complex and high-profile cases, were unsettled by a memo that Attorney General Pam Bondi issued in February 2025, signaling that the Department of Justice would “zealously advance” Mr. Trump’s policies.
For months, the prosecutors in Minnesota focused their attention on high-impact cases that were already underway, including the investigation into fraud in social services programs, largely insulating the office from some priorities in Washington. The office mantra became: “The best defense is a good offense.”
That approach unraveled late last year. News articles about the fraud cases — and later a video by a right-wing influencer — drew attention from Mr. Trump. Administration officials focused on the fact that most of the defendants charged in the sprawling fraud cases were of Somali descent. Though most Somalis in Minnesota are citizens or legal residents of the United States, White House officials cited them and the rash of fraud as a reason to send thousands of immigration agents to the state.
Tensions quickly rose on the streets between immigration agents and Minnesotans. And at the prosecutors’ office, the fraud investigations slowed as prosecutors said they were overwhelmed with requests for briefings from federal agencies on that issue.
Debating an Investigation
Not long after Ms. Good’s death, senior administration officials were quick to blame her for the shooting. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, called Ms. Good a domestic terrorist, language that Vice President JD Vance echoed.
Even in a rules-shattering administration, the hasty conclusions about the shooting shocked federal prosecutors in Minnesota. Veteran lawyers in the office watched numerous videos of the shooting. Virtually all presumed there would be a civil rights investigation into the use of force, an approach often used in shootings involving law enforcement officers.
Some believed that a civil rights investigation could establish that the ICE agent had a reasonable fear for his life when he opened fire as Ms. Good’s car began lurching toward him — the sort of police shooting investigators consider “awful but lawful.” Others suggested that such an investigation might find otherwise, or even that the failure of agents to provide medical aid to Ms. Good after the shooting might be deemed a civil rights violation.
Even Chris Madel, a prominent Minnesota defense lawyer who provided legal advice to Mr. Ross, the agent, after the shooting, supported conducting a civil rights investigation. Mr. Madel worked at the Department of Justice years ago.
“In the absence of an independent use-of-force investigation, you lead the public to believe that there must be something to hide,” said Mr. Madel.
As Department of Justice officials pushed back against suggestions that a civil rights investigation was in order in the days after Ms. Good’s death, clashes between Minnesota residents and immigration agents escalated. Some prosecutors were met with resistance when they urged supervisors to open investigations into reports of assaults and abuses by federal agents. The Justice Department also blocked the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from taking part in investigating Ms. Good’s killing, adding to prosecutors’ frustrations.
At one point, Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol leader who was the face of the administration’s immigration crackdown in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, called federal prosecutors, pressing them to charge demonstrators with crimes. When a prosecutor asked what the operation’s end goal was, several people familiar with the call recalled Mr. Bovino saying that he did not intend to “calm it down,” but instead, he said, “We’re going to put it down.”
Mr. Rosen, who took office as U.S. attorney in October, urged his top deputies again to seek the alternative warrant that leaders in Washington had called for, focusing on a criminal investigation into Ms. Good’s partner and her behavior and ties to protest groups.
At that, Mr. Thompson submitted his resignation letter. Others soon followed.
Soon after, Ms. Bondi told Fox News that the lawyers who left “suddenly decided they didn’t want to support the men and women at ICE.” Referring to them as members of the “deep state,” Ms. Bondi said she had fired them, resulting in the loss of months of unused vacation they had banked.
Weeks after Ms. Good’s death, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, brushed aside questions about the Justice Department’s refusal to open a civil rights investigation into the shooting, saying: “Cases are handled differently by this department depending on the circumstances.”
With roughly a dozen prosecutors gone, Mr. Rosen has worked to reassure those who remain in the office. As he sought to build a new leadership team, Mr. Rosen approached several prosecutors about possible promotions. At least three of them soon left the office: Allen Slaughter, the chief of narcotics investigations and cases from tribal territories; Dan Bobier, a fraud expert; and Lauren Roso, a national security specialist who was preparing to try a terrorism case.
None of the prosecutors who have left the office have discussed their reasons publicly.
Unease among prosecutors has continued to mount as the Justice Department announced a criminal investigation into leading Democrats in the state and charges against nine people, including two journalists, accused in connection to a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minn., where an ICE official serves as a pastor.
In recent days, as Mr. Rosen has sought to steady an office on edge, colleagues say he has made comments that unsettled them further. Several people said that Mr. Rosen vowed not to ask anyone to do anything illegal — an assurance that normally, the people said, would go without saying.
Mr. Rosen, a commercial litigator who had no prior criminal litigation experience, also has conveyed that the office, under his leadership, was committed to furthering the goals of Mr. Trump.
In a declaration submitted as part of an immigration lawsuit late last month, Mr. Rosen described an office under extraordinary strain as a severely understaffed team found itself contending with a “flood” of cases that have grown out of the federal immigration crackdown. He said detained immigrants had filed more than 420 lawsuits in January alone. The office, he wrote, “is operating in a reactive mode,” with lawyers and paralegals “continuously working overtime.”
Chief O’Hara said he was disappointed that Mr. Rosen had been unable to keep veteran prosecutors from leaving the office. “I couldn’t imagine being the leader of a team where so many of the best players that are just so central to the mission decide they’ve got to walk away because they don’t want their integrity to be compromised,” he said.
Andrew Luger, who preceded Mr. Rosen as the U.S. attorney in Minnesota during the Obama and Biden administrations, said the exodus of prosecutors will have far-reaching implications, particularly for the stated purpose of the immigration crackdown: fighting fraud and crime.
The top fraud experts in the office left. So did Melinda Williams, a veteran in prosecuting sex crimes and child pornography cases. Thomas Calhoun-Lopez, who oversaw the major violent crimes unit, also departed.
“It will take years to build the contacts in state and local law enforcement that has been lost,” Mr. Luger said.
Glenn Thrush and Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
6) They Used to Rule the West. Now They’re Dying.
By Anton Jäger, Feb. 7, 2026
Mr. Jäger is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of the forthcoming “Hyperpolitics.” He wrote from Brussels.
Alex Gamsu Jenkins
It is a familiar conundrum by now. Yet in the opening weeks of 2026 — as President Trump kidnapped a foreign leader, threatened to invade an ally and looked on as federal agents detained and killed American citizens in the country’s streets — a slightly tired question has resounded with new urgency. How did the United States get here?
For chroniclers raking over the ashes of the past decade’s tumult, Mr. Trump is at the heart of the matter. Cupidity, ruthlessness, charisma: All are offered as explanations for his rise and conduct alike. In their laser focus on the man himself, however, such analyses can read like compliments rather than critiques, as if Mr. Trump did it all by himself. Inevitably, his relish for unilateral action only reinforces such a personalist interpretation.
This is no new problem with strongmen. In the 19th century, Karl Marx faulted critics of Napoleon III — the nephew of the first Napoleon who managed to get himself crowned emperor of France in 1852 — for losing sight of the structures that enabled him to ascend to power. In such readings, he appeared as “a bolt from the blue” with “a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history,” even as opponents depicted him as a grotesque upstart. Studies of Mr. Trump similarly pull in two directions: Both a buffoon and a mastermind, he appears as a figure who somehow blundered to the top of the American state.
Others, to be sure, have looked at the larger social forces that pushed Mr. Trump to the fore — the backing from key sections of business, the fissuring of American society and the toll of decades of deindustrialization and economic inequality. These must be part of any adequate analytical picture. Critics have often focused their ire on Mr. Trump’s enablers, too, including the G.O.P. grandees who accommodated him.
Yet there has been less talk about the Grand Old Party itself, now solidly regrouped around its redeemer. According to political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, the party had become “hollow” — a hollowing that made Republicans particularly vulnerable to Mr. Trump’s dominion. Once again, this requires an adjustment of perspective. Rather than peer at the match that set everything ablaze, we must ask how the environment became so flammable in the first place.
Here the party rather than the man is paramount. For it is the long-term weakening of the Republican Party that explains Mr. Trump’s stride to political power. Given how flush it is with donor money, this might seem like a counterintuitive conclusion. Yet it is precisely the party’s loss of independence that has made it prey to a Trumpian hostile takeover. Lacking infrastructure and personnel, the Republican Party has become a bidding hall for private donors. Of this bazaar, Mr. Trump is now lord and master.
It is tempting to view this as a specifically American development. Admittedly, the Republican Party is singular in its rightward lurch in the past decade: No other comparable European center-right outfit has been thus transformed into a vehicle for one-man nativism. Compared with their European counterparts, both American parties are strange beasts: no members, open primaries and a seemingly unlimited access to private funds. To inhabitants of the Old World, they seem more corporate brand than mass organization.
Yet for all its extremity, the Republican Party exemplifies a trend affecting all Western democracies. Since the 1990s, political parties across the West have been hemorrhaging members amid a wider weakening of internal structures. While especially damaging on the left, always reliant on popular support, the trend affected forces across the spectrum. As a void opened between voters and parties, many citizens stopped engaging with them and even decided to opt out of voting altogether. The result has been a steady erosion of mainstream parties’ electoral support.
With this came a financial switch. Over the same period, Western parties have increasingly relied on external funds rather than membership dues. This has made them more open to business influence, with all the volatility that entails, and liable to capture by cranks and extremists. Across Europe, traditional parties are a shadow of what they once were. Socially uprooted and economically dependent, they too have been hollowed out.
In any story of today’s political disorders, this should be no subplot. At least since World War II, the West has been defined by its party system: different in each place but usually involving a duopoly of ruling parties fringed by smaller outfits, each robustly anchored in society. The system was the groundwork on which Western political life was built — unobtrusive, unremarked upon, yet quietly essential.
After tottering awhile, it has started to give way. The consequences are legion: emboldened far rights, poisoned public spheres, fissiparous loyalties and a political future defined more by helplessness than by choice. These are the symptoms of our new, hyperpolitical age — where politics is all around and yet somehow eludes stable forms.
The modern mass party reached its apogee in the middle of the 20th century. Yet it was most memorably portrayed in the interwar period, the era of continental fascism, when hundreds of thousands of Europeans became far-right partisans and paramilitary violence spilled into the continent’s streets. From his prison cell, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci compared the mass party to the prince feted in the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli. The modern equivalent of Machiavelli’s ruler — the definitive master of a state — could not “be a real person,” Gramsci wrote, but had to be “the political party.”
In the decades after, Gramsci’s prediction largely came true. Across the West, voters became tied to mass parties, chiefly on the center-left and center-right. Their names were as familiar as the furniture: in Britain, the Conservatives and Labour; in Germany, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats; in France, the Gaullists and the Socialists; in America, of course, the Democrats and the Republicans. The polarization was less pronounced in Northern Europe, but that was because of more parties, not fewer. The party system in general, involving the regular transfer of power and scores of lifelong members, flourished.
In Gramsci’s own country of Italy, however, its downfall was dizzyingly sudden. In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union broke apart, the Communist Party liquidated itself. Then, after a tumultuous anti-corruption campaign dragged down the whole political class, the two other parties that had defined the country’s postwar period — the Christian Democrats and the Socialists — followed suit. Into the void bounded the billionaire media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, retilting the political landscape around his telegenic personality. Gone were the anchored parties; in came Mr. Berlusconi’s personalized outfit and his opponents.
As with Mr. Trump and the Republican Party today, this was an outlier case. Yet the 1990s brought growing disaffection with politics on both sides of the Atlantic: Party membership dropped, strike activity slumped, and fewer citizens voted or turned out to protest. A steady retreat from the public sphere was underway; political theorists began to describe the age as one of “post-politics.” No longer were political affairs on Western citizens’ minds, with the process given over to career politicians and specialists. The party was a scheming prince no more, but a hurried professional.
The effects proved epochal. Across Europe, mainstream parties lost their supremacy. In some cases, like France, it was dramatic, as both major forces of the postwar period were reduced to a rump; in others, like Germany, it was gentler but no less visible, with the two main parties’ vote share dropping sharply. In Britain and Spain, leading parties went into coalition with smaller, younger outfits, unable to command a majority on their own. Throughout, a pattern of decline remained unmistakable. Today, the Western party looks more like a street hawker, desperately seeking customers.
The eclipse of traditional parties has not led to the withering of political activity, however. On the contrary, it has gone hand in hand with much greater politicization. In this decade, politics seems to be everywhere, all at once. In America, the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were potentially the largest in the country’s history, with some estimates putting the number of participants at over 20 million. Turnout in European and American elections is healthy; protests are recurrent and intense; political violence, including assassination attempts, is making a brutal comeback. On social media, in turn, political discourse has become both omnipresent and diffuse. Clearly, “post-politics” has come to an end.
This effusion often invites comparisons to Gramsci’s time, the high tide of political activism. One fact, however, voids the analogy: Western societies today, unlike during the 1920s and 1930s, are experiencing a continuous erosion of institutional structures. Trade unions, civic associations, social clubs, volunteer networks and churches: All are in abeyance. Both the Jan. 6 riots and the Black Lives Matter protests — to take the two most eye-catching examples of political contestation in America — were large and energetic. But they also proved very short-lasting and birthed neither durable infrastructure nor dues-paying memberships.
The result is a peculiar scissor shape: on the one hand, intense political activity; on the other, continued institutional sclerosis. Where in the 1990s we had parties without politics, we now have politics without parties. This is the strange confluence I have termed hyperpolitics. For traditional political parties, the previous bedrock of Western political stability, it is a lethal tonic.
Nowhere is this more visible than in what some consider the first mass party in Western history: the British Conservative Party. Often enough, historians locate the birth of mass politics on the left. Yet before the German socialists broke onto their country’s electoral scene in the 1890s, British Tories were already busy crafting a mass organization. With universal suffrage on its way, the incentives were clear. British conservatives did not lapse into fatalism about the mandate it would grant to radical forces. To them, reconciling property and democracy was anything but impossible.
The result was a political ecosystem with branches throughout British society, from the so-called Primrose League to the Conservative Clubs. Paul McCartney and John Lennon played their first gig together at such a club, at a time when Tory organizations continued to thrive. Alongside this rich braid of associational life, the party could claim an astonishing postwar high of 2.8 million members — far more than Labour. The Conservatives may have appealed most directly to the affluent and privileged, but they were deeply embedded across society.
By the 1980s, with Margaret Thatcher in control of the party, this position no longer appeared so sure. Her government made the conscious choice to weaken British society’s grip on the state and liberalize the economy. This move had its advantages — foreign competition could further crush trade union strength — but it also threatened the social bases of the right, from shopkeepers to local gentry. As a political calculation it was nonetheless logical: There were ways of winning elections that did not presuppose mass organization. After all, the Tories mostly controlled the press and could hire consultancy firms to rally voters.
In the late 1990s, the limits of this strategy began to reveal themselves. The British press threw in its lot with the modernized Labour Party of Tony Blair, which proved itself more adept at focus-group electioneering. For the Conservatives, a long spell in the wilderness beckoned. Fortuitously, the financial crash returned it to power, albeit in coalition; in the second half of the 2010s, the party was able to exploit the cleavages caused by the Brexit vote to survive. But the membership continued to dwindle. In the party’s most recent leadership election, the first since being cast out of power, just 95,000 voted.
Today the party is on the verge of extinction, threatened by the rise of the far-right Reform U.K. A steady drip of defections has turned into a stream, as even high-profile former Tory ministers jump ship. Previously generous donors are crossing over, too. To these absconders, the game is up: Significantly outstripping the Tories in the polls, Reform is well on its way to becoming the real party of the right. On current projections, the Conservatives are likely to be reduced to rubble in the next election, a watershed whose significance would be hard to overstate.
Reform is itself an exemplar of the new hyperpolitical age. It was initially formed by Nigel Farage, its pugnacious leader, as a business, not a party; now it claims over 250,000 members. But these are not party members in the traditional sense: They remain more like digital supporters or online adherents. Thriving off surges of media attention, savvy use of social media and the outsize personality of Mr. Farage — a true hyperleader, as the Italian political scientist Paolo Gerbaudo would say — the party has traded depth for width.
Such attenuation has its advantages, of course. With voters flocking to its banner, the party has a serious chance to form the next government. Yet such swarms of support are also difficult to command. They instead follow the fluctuations of the political stock market: Investors rush to buy a share but may dump it again tomorrow. In time, too, Mr. Farage may find his paper-thin party hard to control, especially as it inches closer to power.
In the United States, a debate is unfolding about whether ICE might provide civic grounding for an ascendant far right. Twentieth-century fascism, after all, found a welcome base in the security forces. Here again, however, Trumpists are likely to be disappointed. Washington is indeed rolling out an arbitrary and cruel deportation machine. Yet its chaos and dysfunction, with fractured chains of command and officers going rogue, are everywhere to see. For the right, the Trump administration’s emboldening of federal agents promises less social solidity than 24/7 theatrics.
Such symbolism also explains why Mr. Trump has taken aim at Minneapolis, the site of the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2020. Protesters have been remarkably resilient in resisting the onslaught. Yet at the heart of their defiance is “an uneasy paradox,” as Jay Caspian Kang recently wrote, in which “millions of people are willing to participate in widespread protests, but few appear to believe that they will lead to much change.”
It is a quandary typical of our age. Without political parties and the lattice of institutions underpinning them, hyperpolitics will retain its staying power — on both the left and the right. True disorder may be just beginning.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
7) When Streets Go Quiet
By Rong Xiaoqing, Feb. 7, 2026
Visuals by Andrés Altamirano
Ms. Xiaoqing is a journalist. Mr. Altamirano is a visual artist.
I first noticed it in late autumn in front of the Queens Public Library in Flushing, where Chinese immigrants gather to socialize, peddle homemade snacks and cheap sneakers, and protest the political system in China.
When I stood on the library steps, I could still hear the horns of passing cars, the coos of pigeons and a chorus of Chinese dialects. But if you know the place as I do, and listen carefully, you can also hear the quietness.
I also saw this in the restaurants, playgrounds and parks along the No. 7 subway line, nicknamed the International Express. Beneath the elevated tracks of the 7 train, Roosevelt Avenue passes through some of New York City’s most ethnically diverse neighborhoods. Hundreds of languages are spoken along this stretch, their cadences mingling with the rhythmic roar of passing trains and the din of bustling shops, eateries and street vendors.
To outsiders, these neighborhoods may still sound raucous. But locals will tell you it’s different now. In November and December, armed federal agents conducted raids in Queens. Arrests and detentions have continued into 2026, leaving many families in a state of watchful quiet. Residents have told me that people are less likely to report crimes. Even simple daily routines — like walking outside — can feel risky.
On a chilly afternoon, I walked along Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights with Hildalyn Colón Hernández, a local resident who works for New Immigrant Community Empowerment, an organization that supports immigrants. She told me that the neighborhood has changed notably in the past few months. A street corner that used to be teeming with day laborers waiting for jobs was now deserted. A nearby plaza that would typically be packed is drawing far fewer people.
Our shadows, stretched long by the slanting sun through the train tracks above, painted the empty sidewalk. When the train pulled into the station, its screeches sounded ominous without the usual backdrop of noise on the street.
The frigid temperatures may have kept some people from venturing out. But business owners and residents told me that they believe the chill brought into some of these neighborhoods by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown had played a bigger role.
I talked to a resident in Corona who has stopped going to the deli where he used to hang out with neighbors because he is afraid of encountering ICE agents. Karla Veroy, a Honduran immigrant who has worked at a thrift shop in Woodside for 20 years, said that business had slowed and she worried about the store’s survival. “Half of my customers are Latinos,” she said.
Some losses are harder to detect.
Many diasporas have converged in Queens, and sometimes residents rally around causes connected to their homelands — but many are now hesitant to do so. In November, a rally in Little Manila, Woodside, to protest corruption in the Philippines drew about 100 people. The organizers told me that the previous time they had a protest like this, about 300 people showed up. This time, many undocumented Filipino immigrants who cared about the issue opted to stay home.
In Flushing, where protests related to China and its government are common, Chinese activists told me the number of demonstrations dropped last year for the same reason: fear of drawing attention to one’s immigration status.
Maybe if President Trump achieves his goal of mass deportations, the voids left by some people will be filled by others. But will New York be the same?
The 7 train carries thousands of people across the city each day. In some neighborhoods, life presses outward, loud and defiant; in others, it pulls inward, careful and contained. The train bears witness to both.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
8) Michael Pollan Says Humanity Is About to Undergo a Revolutionary Change
By David Marchese, Feb. 7, 2026
Michael Pollan with Roshi Joan Halifax, the founder of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, during a visit to the retreat in 2024 while working on his new book. Wendy Lau
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wrestled with my own thoughts and feelings about identity. Why am I, David, the person I am? How changeable is that? Where do those thoughts and feelings come from anyway, and what purposes do they ultimately serve? I suppose it’s no coincidence then that I’ve also always been so curious about the subject of human consciousness. That’s the area of science and philosophy — of human thinking generally! — that burrows most deeply into similar questions and, to varying degrees of satisfaction, offers a plethora of possible answers.
The best-selling author Michael Pollan has been thinking about these things, too. Throughout his work — which includes classic books like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (2006), about why we eat the way we do, and “How to Change Your Mind” (2018), about the science and uses of psychedelic drugs — Pollan has waded into ideas about the inner workings of the mind. Now, with his forthcoming book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” which will arrive this month, he has jumped into the deep end. The book is both a highly personal and expansive multidisciplinary survey of questions around human consciousness — what it is, what causes it, what it’s for and what the possible answers might mean for how we choose to live. And as Pollan explained, with the rise of artificial intelligence as well as the relentless political pressure on our attention (that is, our minds), those questions, already profound, are becoming only more urgent.
I want to get some basics: How do you define consciousness? The simplest way to define consciousness is as subjective experience. Another one-word definition is “awareness.” Thomas Nagel, the N.Y.U. philosopher, wrote a piece back in the ’70s called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” His idea is: If we can imagine it is like anything to be a bat, then a bat is conscious, because that means it has some sort of subjective experience. Why did he choose bats? Well, they’re very different than we are. Instead of using eyesight, they use echolocation. They bounce signals off of objects to move through space. We can vaguely imagine going through the world with echolocation. Whereas my toaster, I can’t do that. I don’t have a sense of what it’s like to be my toaster.
A big question of consciousness is what the philosopher David Chalmers has referred to as the “hard problem.” Can you tell people what that is? Basically how you get from matter to mind, how you cross that huge gulf from neurons to subjective experience — a gulf no one has managed to cross. Related questions are: Why don’t all these things we do go on automatically? Why do we have to be aware of anything? We could be completely automated and perhaps get along just fine. Your brain is monitoring your body and making fine adjustments in the blood gasses, in the heart rate, in digestion. There’s a lot going on that we don’t have to think about. So why do we have to think about any of it? Some interesting theories have been proposed. One is that some of the issues that we deal with have to be decided in a conscious way. When you have two competing needs — you’re hungry and you’re tired — which should take precedence? So consciousness opens up this space of decision-making. The other argument is that we live in a very complex social world where I have to predict what you’re going to say; I have to imagine my way into your head. You can’t automate human social interaction. It has too many elements. So consciousness is very helpful in navigating that world.
It seems likely to me that regardless of the source of consciousness, it’s probably a result of evolutionary processes — that consciousness evolved to make information available to certain parts of the brain, or to help us recognize patterns, or perceive threats, or maintain homeostasis. But are any non-evolutionary arguments for consciousness plausible to you? Oh, yeah. One is panpsychism.
Which could sound bonkers. It can sound bonkers. Panpsychism is the idea that everything, every particle, the ink on the page, the atoms, all have some infinitesimal degree of psyche or consciousness, and somehow this consciousness is combined in some way from our cells and the rest of our bodies to create this kind of superconsciousness. It sounds crazy. There are some very serious people who believe in it. You have to expand your sense of the plausible when you’re looking at consciousness. But we’ve done that before. How long ago was it that we discovered electromagnetism? This crazy idea that there are all these waves passing through us that can carry information. That’s just as mind-blowing, right?
I could happily talk about consciousness all day, but often when I do talk about it with people, I can tell that they view thinking about consciousness as almost akin to navel gazing. Like, it’s an interesting thing to think about, but really what difference does it make? What is your response to that? I’ve thought a lot about what good is it to think about consciousness, and I came to think that it’s more important than ever. Scientists are now learning that more and more animals and creatures — going all the way down possibly to insects — are conscious. So that’s one interesting issue: We’re sharing consciousness with more creatures. And then the big threat is artificial intelligence and the effort to create a conscious A.I., which is going to be an enormous challenge to this question of what does it mean to be human. Is consciousness something that a machine can possess? Are we more like intelligent machines or conscious, feeling animals? Who are we? So I think we’re approaching this kind of Copernican moment of redefinition.
What do you think we should do with the increasing awareness that more animals might be conscious than we previously thought? I guess the argument would be that we should have a greater amount of respect for them, but we know human beings are conscious and we exploit the hell out of other humans all the time. That’s a great question. There’s this whole conversation, very active here where I live in Silicon Valley, that if A.I. is conscious, then we’re going to have to give it moral consideration. Well, really? Have we given moral consideration to one another? Have we given moral consideration to the chickens and the cattle that we eat? The answer is no. It doesn’t automatically follow. So we’re going to have to sort out the ethics. Maybe it’s around the ability to suffer. Maybe that’s where you draw the line. I don’t know. I’m not an ethicist, but it’s not as easy as: You’re conscious, therefore you have all these rights. A.I. is really going to complicate this. Who we grant personhood to is a very subjective human decision. We give it to corporations, oddly enough, which are not conscious, but there are all sorts of creatures we don’t give it to. I don’t think we’re entirely rational or consistent in our granting of moral consideration.
You are skeptical that A.I. can achieve consciousness. Why? I’m convinced by some of the researchers, including Antonio Damasio and Mark Solms, who made a really compelling case that the origin of consciousness is with feelings, not thoughts. Feelings are the language in which the body talks to the brain. We forget that brains exist to keep bodies alive, and the way the body gets the brain’s attention is with feelings. So if you think feelings are at the center of consciousness, it’s very hard to imagine how a machine could rise to that level to have feelings. The other reason I think we’re not close to it is that everything that machines know, the data set on which they’re trained, is information on the internet. They don’t have friction with nature. They don’t have friction with us. Some of the most important things we know are about person-to-person contact, about contact with nature — this friction that really makes us human.
Despite how it may seem, the internet is not actually the whole of the world. But to a computer, it’s all you got.
How would we know if an A.I. is conscious or not? How do I know you’re conscious?
I promise I am! Your promise is what’s called reportability in philosophy. You can ask something if it’s conscious, and with humans, we kind of know.
But if an A.I. says: “Michael, I’m conscious. I promise,” how do we know? We don’t, and that is exactly why people are falling deep into these relationships with A.I. We can’t say it’s not conscious when it tells us it is. But we can test it in various ways. It all goes back to this idea of the Turing test — that the test of machine intelligence would be when they can fool us.
If the Turing test is the criteria for machine consciousness, then that test has already been passed. Exactly, it has fooled many, many people. Whether it can fool an expert, too, I don’t know, but probably. So we’re in a very weird place where the machines we’re living with are telling us they’re conscious. We can’t dispute it, but we can look at how they’re made and draw the kind of conclusions I’ve drawn. But is that going to persuade everybody? No. We want them to be conscious in some way. Or some of us do. It’s easier to have a relationship with a chatbot than another human. Going back to that friction point, they offer no friction. They just suck up to us and convince us how brilliant we are, and we fall for it.
What do you think religion has to offer to questions about consciousness? Buddhism has been thinking about consciousness for a very long time. It has been raising these questions about the self and giving people tools to transcend the self, which in itself is a desire that is surprising. We cling to this ego so firmly; at the same time, we do a lot of things to get away from it, whether it’s extreme sports or psychedelics or meditation.
Or watching a movie or having sex or any number of things. Some of the highest experiences of life are these moments where we transcend the self, and that’s curious.
What do you think that’s about? Why, if we cling to the self, are we also so hungry to lose ourselves? The self isolates us, the ego builds walls around it, it’s constantly evaluating, it ruminates. There’s a lot of crappy stuff about the self.
Yeah, it’s constantly yammering away. Yes, there is that voice in our head, and it embodies critical voices, very often inherited from parents or other people. I mean, the ego is very useful. It gets a lot done. It got my book done. It gets your podcast done. So we shouldn’t be too critical of it. On the other hand, when we transcend the self, we connect to things larger than ourselves. And this is one of the beautiful things about psychedelics — when they work, there is this sense of dissolution of self. The walls come down, and you feel part of nature. You feel love. I had an experience I describe in the book of self-dissolution where I merged with this piece of music, this Bach cello suite, and it was such a profound experience because the subject-object split went away and I was identical to this music. The interesting thing, though, is that consciousness doesn’t go away when the ego goes away. We protect our ego because we’re afraid if we lose it, we’re dead. But we’re not. It’s just one voice. There’s a lot else going on, as you learn when you meditate and use psychedelics.
How often do you do psychedelics? Not very often at all. It’s hard to find time. It’s a big day with a lot of preparation and everything. If I can do it once a year, I’m happy. What I’m talking about is ideally a guided experience. You can let yourself go when someone’s watching your body. So when I can put myself in that situation — which isn’t easy to do, and it’s expensive — I find that very valuable. I’m still learning things.
What are you learning? Oh, every psychedelic experience is different. You never go back to the same place. That’s why I think it’s a great thing to do on or around your birthday, to sort of take stock of your reality and what the issues are. I had an experience not too long ago that kind of rocked me.
What was it? It was a guided trip on — it doesn’t matter what it was on. I had these powerful emotions that had no name. They were like these giant blimps crashing into me, crashing into each other, and I was straining and so frustrated that I didn’t know what they were, and the answer never came clear during the experience. Oddly enough, the answer to what they were came two weeks later when I happened to be at a meditation retreat. The links between psychedelics and meditation are very fruitful and interesting. I was doing a walking meditation after a couple days of complete silence, 12-hour-a-day meditating, and there were the blimps. In sans serif letters, right on the blimp, was the word “fear.” I quickly realized what it was. It was fear of losing something very close to you. So the combination of two experiences ended up being very productive. But on its own, the psychedelic experience raised more questions than gave answers.
Questions of consciousness, which are really questions about what makes us us, are some of the most important questions that can be asked. But at the same time, they can lead into other questions like: Is there some David — some stable “I” — that exists or not? Or what is the relationship between free will and consciousness? Sometimes thinking about those questions can be destabilizing. Is that just me? Do you have similar apprehensions? It can be destabilizing, absolutely. One of the reasons people are happy to be less conscious and fill their attention with distractions and drugs is because the mind can be a scary place to visit. We often want to be less aware of what’s going on. There are reasons people avoid going down these rabbit holes. It takes a willingness to risk something.
I apologize if this seems like a woo-woo question, but do you think the absence of something like a stable “self” also means the absence of something like a soul? Do you believe in a soul? Well, if a soul is something that is indestructible and survives our death, no. But I can’t say anything about the afterlife with confidence. Consciousness has become our secular substitute for the soul; we talk about consciousness the way people in the 16th or 17th century talked about souls. Some people’s interest in it is the fact that it floats free of these mortal bodies and maybe gets folded into a collective consciousness after we’re gone. So I think there is a hidden religiosity or spirituality in the whole conversation around consciousness. Somebody asked me recently, Do you think as people get older, they are more interested in consciousness? And I would say yes, and probably for that reason.
It does seem that many of us have consistencies to ourselves that are a little hard to explain in the absence of something like a stable identity or a soul. In the new book, you mention a period in your teenage years when you were reading Hermann Hesse, writing bad poetry and thinking about the big questions. I don’t know if you still write bad poetry, but the other two things don’t seem that far away from what you’re now doing in your 70s. So what might explain what seem like intrinsic core qualities that are constant for you through time if not a stable self-identity or a soul? Even though I talk a lot about this idea that maybe the self is an illusion, it still has a conventional reality. The fact that I’m using myself to talk to yourself makes this very easy. If neither of us had selves right now, it would be a very loosey-goosey conversation. I can’t even imagine what it would be like. Matthieu Ricard said: It’s like a river has a name, and that conventional name is very useful, but there’s nothing consistent there. It’s just water passing.
I brought something like this up earlier, but I want to ask another version of it. This morning I was reading the news and thinking, Gosh, right now, is talking to Michael Pollan about consciousness a kind of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” conversation? I decided the answer is no, but do you ever have those doubts? I did at various points when I was starting on this book and the world was starting to fall apart. Like, is this how I should be using my energy? But I think that consciousness is at stake in a lot of what’s going on. One of the things Trump has done is occupy a significant chunk of our attention every single day. Our consciousness is being polluted, and protecting ourselves against that at the same time we preserve the ability to act politically is a difficult balancing act. Consciousness is a very precious realm. It’s the realm of our privacy and our freedom to think. So I think we need some kind of consciousness hygiene, particularly at this moment, where this one politician has figured out ways to command our attention. Consciousness is more relevant now than it even was 10 or 20 years ago, as something to think about, protect and nurture.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
9) As American Views of ICE Dim, Warehouses Become a Symbol of Resistance
Plans to confine migrants in retrofitted buildings have ignited bipartisan dissent as the country has grown more critical of immigration officials.
By Ana Ley, Feb. 8, 2026
One frigid January night, a crush of protesters filled a senior center just outside the village of Chester, N.Y.
Some dabbed tears under white fluorescent lights as the sound of chanting wafted from the parking lot, where hundreds more sipped hot chocolate and pressed picket signs against the building’s windows.
They had gathered to oppose a plan by the federal government to bring its deportation muscle to Chester, a hamlet of 4,000 residents in the heart of a Republican stronghold 60 miles northwest of Manhattan. The idea was to retrofit a former Pep Boys distribution center into a detention facility that could confine as many as 1,500 migrants. But in a moment that foreshadowed the nation’s souring view of President Trump’s enforcement tactics, the proposal ignited instant bipartisan dissent.
Republican and Democratic elected officials and residents across the Hudson Valley region lambasted the plan, expressing fears that the immigration operation would overwhelm scarce local resources and unleash a torrent of fraught encounters with federal agents. On social media, there is support for the facility, but it has been muted.
“Everywhere that this has happened has been kind of a real dumpster fire,” said Steven M. Neuhaus, a Republican who is the Orange County executive. “It’s been greeted with controversy, protests, violence, and it’s not something that we want in this sleepy county.”
Chester isn’t alone. A year into the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, communities across the United States are opposing plans to convert warehouses into detention centers. The warehouses have become a potent symbol for critics who have painted them as inhumane places with grim accommodations.
The backlash comes at a time of inflamed emotions over the killing of two protesters by federal agents in Minneapolis, which for weeks has been the epicenter of the nation’s rancorous immigration debate.
The future of the project in Chester remains murky: The Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has not said whether it is moving forward with its idea. Elsewhere across the United States, similar proposals have been quashed. In Oklahoma City, the Republican mayor, David Holt, commended the owners of a property for pulling out of a deal with ICE.
In a statement, ICE dismissed concerns about the fitness of the buildings and said that they would be well-designed to accommodate migrants.
“Every day, D.H.S. is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe,” the ICE statement said. “It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.”
Even as Mr. Trump has received Republican support for his deportation crackdown, the opposition in Chester illustrated the often contradictory politics of the immigration debate. While many voters in the United States support curbing illegal immigration, a majority have also come to disapprove of ICE.
In Chester, several hundred protesters in puffer jackets gathered next to a wooded area in the dark parking lot of the senior center. One man banged on a drum while another shouted into a bullhorn as the group chanted. They placed picket signs on shrubs that faced light car traffic.
Manolin Tirado, 66, lives in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., and showed up hoisting a metal folding chair to sit out for a long night. Mr. Tirado said that he opposed the facility because he did not want Orange County to take on the financial burden of policing demonstrations held by ICE critics. Mr. Tirado said that he was also worried about immigration agents violating people’s civil rights.
“I don’t want to see American citizens jailed or have possible confrontations with law enforcement,” Mr. Tirado said. “What guarantees that they won’t pick up local Chester residents?”
John T. Bell, the Chester village mayor, sent a four-page letter to ICE citing zoning and sewer restrictions that prohibit the agency from putting 1,500 people in the Pep Boys building, which was designed to hold 150. He also criticized ICE for failing to share its plan with local officials before making it public.
“We hope your agency will act with some more professionalism and courtesy to the village in the future when planning such a project,” Mr. Bell wrote.
Attempts to reach owners of the Pep Boys facility as well as brokers for the property were unsuccessful. Public records identify the owner as an affiliate of Icahn Enterprises, a company controlled by Carl Icahn. He is a billionaire who was one of the first corporate raiders, now known as activist investors, who bought stakes in companies and agitated for management to make changes.
Chester Republicans were bothered that ICE operations were disrupting the country’s quality of life, while Democrats expressed moral outrage over arrest strategies and interactions with the public, which they described as oppressive and cruel.
Polls released in recent weeks show that while a vast majority of Republicans support Mr. Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement, a small but growing share of them are questioning his enforcement tactics. And many independent voters, who helped Mr. Trump win the 2024 election, agree.
Fifty percent of voters across the United States said that they approved of the Trump administration’s deportations of people living in the country illegally, while 47 percent opposed them, according to a poll conducted in January by The New York Times and Siena University.
A broad majority of voters — 63 percent — disapprove of the way ICE is handling its job after a year in which Mr. Trump deployed thousands of federal officers to cities led by Democrats, creating wide-scale protests and scenes of chaos on the streets. Sixty-one percent of voters said that ICE had “gone too far,” including nearly one in five Republicans.
Representative Pat Ryan, a Democrat whose district includes Chester, created a petition opposing the proposal that amassed more than 20,000 signatures by late January. Mr. Ryan presented an anonymized version of the petition to D.H.S. before its Jan. 16 deadline for public input.
“We’re seeing innocent civilians harassed, detained and even killed,” Mr. Ryan said in a prepared statement.
The congressman said on X that he received a message from ICE declining to share details about its plans to expand operations in Chester, blaming a “heightened threat environment” and “unprecedented opposition being thrown up by the left.”
Isabella Almodovar, 26, lives in the town of Chester and teaches high school students English as a new language. Ms. Almodovar said that she showed up to January’s meeting because she had been disturbed by the treatment of migrants by ICE officers elsewhere across the country, and she did not want the agency to come to Chester.
“The one thing that we need to do is come together and really fight,” Ms. Almodovar said. “That’s the only thing that can help to try and end this.”
Others in Chester are hopeful that ICE will expand operations there.
Seth Cohen, 40, is a construction worker who said that he was frustrated by undocumented workers who took jobs for less money than him. He was grateful that ICE officials were working to reduce illegal immigration, which he said had spiraled out of control under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“I think ICE is a good thing, cleaning up the town, cleaning up the surrounding area,” Mr. Cohen said.
The people at the town meeting said that they were compelled to demonstrate because an ICE officer in Minneapolis shot and killed the protester Renee Good in early January. Ms. Good’s death inspired protests nationwide, prompting the Trump administration to send 1,000 more agents to Minnesota. Since then, federal agents have killed another protester, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive-care nurse described by the Minneapolis police chief as a U.S. citizen with no criminal record.
Videos of Mr. Pretti’s death contradicted claims by federal officials who defended the agents who killed him, provoking widespread criticism, including from Mr. Trump’s Republican allies. The backlash led to a softening of immigration operations, and this month, the president said that he had ordered 700 agents to leave Minnesota.
Timothy McDonough was one of about 30 speakers during last month’s meeting who urged the Chester village board to oppose the new center. Mr. McDonough, an Air Force and Navy veteran who served in the U.S. military for 22 years, cited concerns about inadequate oversight and access to legal counsel for migrants in detention.
“Please, I’m begging you,” Mr. McDonough said, his voice breaking. “What they’re doing out there is just horrible.”
Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
10) Cuba’s Government Has Lasted 67 Years. Will It Fall Under Trump?
The Trump administration, which has tightened the U.S. chokehold on Cuba by cutting off foreign oil, is betting that this is the Cuban communist revolution’s last year.
By Frances Robles and David C. Adams, Reporting from Florida, Feb. 8, 2026
Fidel Castro, who led Cuba from the 1959 revolution until he formally stepped down in 2008, speaking in Santa Maria Del Mar in 1964. Credit...Jack Manning/The New York Times
Celebrations broke out in front of Miami’s Versailles restaurant nearly 20 years ago after Fidel Castro announced that he was so sick he had to temporarily step down as president of Cuba.
Cuban exiles rejoiced again two years later when he quit for good — and once more when he died in 2016, though his brother Raúl Castro was president at the time.
Now, the country’s economy is in free fall, its electric grid is failing, millions of its citizens have left and the Cuban government is facing off against perhaps its most menacing foe: President Trump.
Mr. Trump has closed off Cuba’s access to oil shipments, helped cripple its vital tourism industry and declared that Cuba’s government is “going down for the count.”
The Trump administration and the many Cuban exiles who have been waiting nearly seven decades for the fall of Cuba’s Communist government said they believed this might finally be their moment.
After years of U.S. presidents trying various economic pressure tactics to hasten the demise of the Cuban government, the Trump administration’s cutoff of fuel has raised the ante drastically because oil keeps the country — from public transit to factories to farms — running.
Predictions of the demise of Cuba’s government have been made before, notably after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which had been Cuba’s main benefactor, only to be proved wrong.
But this time, experts say, the survival of Cuba’s government appears very much in doubt.
Members of South Florida’s Cuban exile community say Trump administration officials have been assuring them that the Cuban government’s days are numbered.
The U.S. government “has determined that Cuba must be free before the end of 2026,” said Marcell Felipe, a prominent Cuban exile leader in Miami who chairs the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora and said he had met with U.S. diplomats. “This is a plan in motion.”
Besides oil, Mr. Trump’s plans have also largely centered around eliminating Cuba’s access to hard currency from tourism and the country’s medical missions abroad, said a senior State Department official who spoke on the condition that his name not be published in order to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.
Cuba’s tourism industry never recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic in part because of measures by the Trump administration making it harder for Europeans to travel to the United States after visiting Cuba.
After the U.S. military captured the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Mr. Trump halted Venezuelan oil to Cuba. Venezuela had long kept Cuba afloat with 35,000 barrels of oil a day in exchange for medical services by Cuban doctors.
Mr. Trump also announced tariffs against any country that sends oil to Cuba. Taken together, the measures effectively cut off the only two suppliers of oil to Cuba — Venezuela and Mexico — just as Cuba has been enduring island-wide power outages. Cuba does produce its own oil, but only enough to meet 40 percent of its daily needs, and a lack of international shipments would eventually paralyze the country, analysts said.
Mr. Trump says the United States is in talks with top Cuban leaders, but has not elaborated.
“Cuba is a failing nation,” Mr. Trump told reporters recently. “It has been for a long time, but now it doesn’t have Venezuela to prop it up. So we’re talking to the people from Cuba, the highest people in Cuba, to see what happens.”
The Cuban government declined to comment for this article.
Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossio, told the EFE news agency that “messages had been exchanged” with the Trump administration, but denied any dialogue was taking place.
He ruled out any discussions of political or economic change, noting that the United States has no more say in such matters than Cuba would dictating how ICE agents should conduct migrant raids in Minneapolis.
“If people are thinking that there is division within the Cuban government, division within the political forces in Cuba, and a willingness,” he was quoted as saying, “to capitulate to the unjustified and immoral pressure and aggression of the United States, that’s a mistaken interpretation.”
Juan Triana, a professor at the Center for the Study of the Cuban Economy, at the University of Havana, noted that Cuba did not collapse even in the 1990s during the crisis known as the “Special Period” after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“Everyone looked to Cuba expecting it to fall, and they lost the bet,” he said. “President after president of the United States has lost it.”
Still, a rare news conference that Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, held last week seemed to acknowledge the severity of the country’s problems. He described plans to ration Cuba’s limited supply of domestic oil, and to expand solar and wind-powered energy, but made no mention of securing new oil imports.
The Cuban government has sent mixed messages to the Trump administration, posting sharply worded message on social media, but also issuing a more tempered statement.
Cuba proposed renewing cooperation with the United States on issues like counterterrorism, anti-money laundering, drug trafficking prevention, cybersecurity, human trafficking and financial crimes.
At the same time, Cuba has also targeted Mike Hammer, the head of the U.S. Embassy in Havana, with small groups of government supporters heckling him and calling him a “murderer.” Mr. Hammer’s diplomatic vehicle was surrounded by protesters five times as he left meetings in various Cuban cities, episodes known in Cuba as “acts of repudiation,” the State Department said.
A U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the administration’s interactions with Havana said Cuban officials were nervous because they were starting to realize their revolution was coming to an end.
The senior State Department official who discussed the White House’s strategy said most of the talks with the Cuban government were around technical issues, like repatriation flights, and were not substantive.
The problem is not that the two sides do not talk, but that there is a fundamental disagreement about what should be on the table, the State Department official said.
If Cuban officials were to approach the Trump administration with significant offers, such as allowing more private enterprise and competing political parties, the administration would be willing to engage more actively, the official said.
The Trump administration, the official said, was seeking discussions similar to talks taking place in Venezuela, where the interim government has agreed to take steps toward economic transformation and democracy.
But that approach would be difficult because there is no Cuban official in place like Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, who has been willing to placate the Trump administration, said Ricardo Zúniga, a former Obama administration official who helped lead secret negotiations with Cuba. Cuba’s government has sidelined any government official who appeared to have political aspirations.
Many experts point out another key challenge if Cuba’s government were to fall: It is unclear who would lead the country because the government has imprisoned most opposition leaders or driven them into exile.
Peter Kornbluh, an author of a history of secret negotiations between Cuba and the United States, said he believed talks were already underway.
“It makes sense that the U.S. and Cuba are engaged in back channel talks, even if they are the result of criminal coercion from the Trump White House,” said Mr. Kornbluh, a critic of U.S. hard-line economic policies. “Dialogue, even under duress, is preferable to overt U.S. aggression and offers a potential off ramp for both sides."
The 2013 talks during the Obama administration were so secret that not even the State Department knew about them. The discussions, brokered by the Vatican and held there and in Canada, led to the renewal of diplomatic relations and a brief period of increased travel.
The discussions centered around the notion that opening Cuba to more private business and improving living conditions would lead to regime change, but the Cuban government ultimately stifled economic opportunities. Mr. Trump’s thinking, Mr. Zúniga said, is the opposite: that economic and social collapse will make the government fold, too.
“I think they are trying to create a condition of extraordinary stress, similar to a war, in Cuba to try to shake loose offers out of the Cuban government side,” he said. “But the Cubans have no vision for a plan that cuts them out of power.”
Ada Ferrer, a history professor at Princeton University whose book “Cuba, an American History” won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in history, said it was true that past predictions of the fall of the Cuban government had been wrong. But now there is no benefactor waiting in the wings to save Cuba’s crashing economy like Venezuela did after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“This time,” she said, “feels different.”
Jack Nicas contributed reporting from Mexico City.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
11) How Bad Bunny Gives Voice to Puerto Rico’s ‘Crisis Generation’
Young Puerto Ricans say the star has opened the world’s eyes to their challenges, and to the island’s fraught territorial relationship with the U.S. government.
By Patricia Mazzei and Laura N. Pérez Sánchez, Feb. 8, 2026
Patricia Mazzei reported from Miami, and Laura N. Pérez Sánchez from San Juan, P.R.
Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times
Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as the superstar Bad Bunny, is a proud product of what Puerto Ricans call the “crisis generation”: those who grew up on the island in the 1990s and 2000s and have little memory of its better days.
He was 12 when Puerto Rico’s economy spiraled into an economic recession from which it has never recovered. By 2016, when he was 22 and started recording music, the island’s government was bankrupt. Hurricane Maria hit the next year, devastating the island and killing nearly 3,000 people. Then came political unrest, the coronavirus pandemic and rapid gentrification.
Members of his generation say that Bad Bunny, now 31, has given voice to their experiences and fears, all while opening the world’s eyes to Puerto Rico’s fraught territorial relationship with the U.S. government.
In making music about young Puerto Ricans’ shared challenges, “he has been able to put us on the map,” said Alejandro Bracero, a 23-year-old studying political science and economics at the University of Puerto Rico’s main campus in San Juan.
Bad Bunny sings and raps about the crisis generation’s struggles in many of his lyrics and talks about them in interviews and on social media. Entire industries in Puerto Rico shut down after a federal corporate tax break expired in 2006, which led residents to leave in droves to find jobs in the states. Severe budget cuts during the debt crisis led to school closures, streets pocked with potholes and frequent power blackouts.
The island’s population declined by 11.8 percent from 2010 to 2020, according to the census. Bad Bunny, an outspoken critic of President Trump’s immigration crackdown, dedicated his win at the Grammys for album of the year to “all the people who had to leave their homeland, their country to follow their dreams.”
Mr. Bracero remembers his grandmother, who was born in 1946, telling him stories about how Puerto Rico boomed in the decades after World War II thanks to a corporate tax break intended to foster industry. “There was a sense of prosperity,” he said, much different from the Puerto Rico he grew up in.
Mayra Vélez Serrano, the chairwoman of the University of Puerto Rico’s political science department, coined the term “crisis generation” in 2016. Since then, it has only become more apt, she said, describing a group of Puerto Ricans who are better educated than their predecessors, yet plagued by stagnant salaries and an unaffordable cost of living.
On average, a teacher in Puerto Rico might make $32,000 a year, Dr. Vélez Serrano said, compared with about $50,000 in Orlando, Fla., where many Puerto Ricans fleeing the island settle. But the average house in Puerto Rico costs about $300,000, compared with about $367,000 in Orlando.
“This huge gap between what we’re earning as professionals and the cost of living has led to the massive outflow of professionals of this generation,” she said, adding that most “are between 20-something and 40,” an age group that includes Bad Bunny.
In Bad Bunny’s “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” the album that won at the Grammys last Sunday, the title track talks about wishing you had taken more photos of people before they left. Another song mentions not wanting to be forced to move. A third is defiant about not wanting to experience “what happened to Hawaii,” with lyrics about losing property to wealthy outsiders and the potential pitfalls if Puerto Rico were to become a state.
“There are people from the United States now living in Caguas,” Abdiel Vargas Sánchez, 24, said with astonishment about his hometown. Caguas, a city of about 120,000 in a mountain valley south of San Juan, was once hardly a destination. But an influx of mainlanders that accelerated during the pandemic, some of them most likely drawn by tax breaks for wealthy investors, has priced out local residents and driven up housing prices across the island.
“Bad Bunny could be the start of something beautiful” for Puerto Rico, Mr. Vargas Sánchez said. Yet he also worried that the artist’s commercial success would ultimately be “only that.”
There have already been signs that the crisis generation is changing Puerto Rican politics.
In 2019, young people, including Bad Bunny and other artists, were instrumental in organizing street protests that forced the resignation of Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló after offensive chat messages between him and his aides, some of which mocked victims of Hurricane Maria, were leaked. Bad Bunny ended a tour early to join the protests, and he and two other artists recorded a song that became a street anthem.
Camila Herrera Biaggi, 24, was still a teenager at the time of the demonstrations but thinks of it as the start of her political awakening. “That was my first protest,” she said, recalling how Bad Bunny and others inspired her to participate. “I told myself that I needed to go.”
New political parties gained traction in the years that followed, as younger voters questioned whether establishment parties wanted to solve the island’s problems. In 2024, Bad Bunny paid for prominent billboards criticizing one of the old parties, the New Progressive Party, and called it corrupt. The party has been in power since 2017 and supports Puerto Rican statehood. He has supported candidates that favor Puerto Rican independence and included many pro-independence symbols in his music videos and lyrics.
Puerto Rico has been a territory of the United States since 1898, after U.S. forces invaded it during the Spanish-American War. In 1917, Congress extended American citizenship to Puerto Ricans, but residents of Puerto Rico cannot vote in presidential elections, have only symbolic representation in Congress and do not have equal access to federal benefits.
Above all, young Puerto Ricans appear intent on re-examining Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States, in light of two defining events of the past decade.
In 2016, Congress passed a law empowering a board appointed by the president to oversee the island’s finances, taking away much of its financial independence and stirring accusations that it was treating Puerto Rico like a colony. The bungled response to Hurricane Maria further eroded Puerto Ricans’ trust in the federal government.
Bad Bunny worked with Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a Puerto Rican historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on text-based videos for his album last year, explaining crucial periods in Puerto Rican history. Some were displayed on big screens during Bad Bunny’s concert residency in Puerto Rico over the summer.
Dr. Meléndez-Badillo called the artist’s Super Bowl performance an opportunity for Puerto Ricans — and everyone else — to have more conversations about the island’s current state and its future.
“I’m seeing this as a pedagogical thing that Benito is doing,” he said. “He’s not simply repping the Puerto Rican flag. He’s also inviting people to grapple with the beauty and messiness of Puerto Rican-ness. A lot of people in the United States don’t really know Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States.”
Nathalia Méndez Rodríguez, a 23-year-old graduate student in public administration and law at the University of Puerto Rico, said she wanted Bad Bunny to keep explaining to the world what she and her peers want most: “to preserve our homeland and our culture and our country and our community.”
“Bad Bunny,” she said, “represents the anxieties of the Puerto Rican people.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
12) Mexico's Sheinbaum aims to send humanitarian aid to Cuba by Monday
By Reuters, February 6, 2026
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum speaks during her daily morning press conference, at the National Palace in Mexico City, Mexico, February 4, 2026.
MEXICO CITY, Feb 6 - Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Friday that her government is aiming to send humanitarian aid, including food and other basic supplies, to Cuba by Monday.
"We are planning to send this aid either this weekend or on Monday at the latest," Sheinbaum said at her morning daily press conference.
Sheinbaum also said that her administration is working "on all diplomatic efforts to be able to resume oil shipments to Cuba," as Mexico halted shipments of crude and refined products to the island in mid-January under pressure from the Trump administration.
Washington subsequently threatened tariffs on countries that supply oil to the communist-ruled island, saying that Cuba poses an "extraordinary threat" to U.S. national security - a claim Havana denies. "Obviously, we do not want sanctions against Mexico, but we are in the process of dialogue and, for now, humanitarian aid will be sent," Sheinbaum said.
Sources told Reuters this week that Mexican officials are seeking ways to send fuel to Cuba to help meet basic needs without the retaliation of tariffs from Washington. It remains uncertain whether Mexico will find a solution.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
